A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

allowing the Metro detectives to carry on a full-scale investigation of Christopher Wilder. The Kenyons still hoped against hope that Beth was alive somewhere; nothing mattered except that she be found as soon as possible.
    Up until this point, the investigation into Beth Kenyon’s disappearance had been conducted mostly by private detectives; when adults go missing, it is a rule of thumb that police departments wait from twenty-four to forty-eight hours before they get actively involved, simply because the vast majority of those missing come home. But eight days later, there was no physical evidence that Beth had been harmed. No blood. No signs of any struggle. No bullet fragments. No torn clothing. Nothing.
    It is difficult to obtain a search warrant without probable cause and a list of what detectives hope to retrieve by going into a car or a house or a boat, “tossing it,” and searching for evidence of a crime. The Metro police didn’t have that probable cause—at least, they felt they did not. Wilder’s background file showed a pattern of his skipping away from prosecution. They wanted to be sure they had him so solidly that there was no way he could slip out of the net they were weaving.

    Theirs was, perhaps, a tragic reluctance to move forward. Chris Wilder had been seeing a woman counselor about his sexual obsessions, a condition of his probation on the rape charges in 1980. Although professional ethics forbade her saying anything to anyone, his therapist suspected he might be dangerous. He seemed to her to be a “walking time bomb.”
    She knew that he was obsessed with sex, fantasizing about holding women captive. His ideal relationship with a female would be that
he
was dominant and his “partner” submissive. As a boy he had wanted to become a white slaver. A decade or more earlier, he had read John Fowles’
The Collector,
a novel where a man kidnaps a woman and keeps her in a sealed room, trapped like some exotic butterfly, totally in his possession.
    Now, Chris Wilder failed to show up for his appointment with his therapist on Thursday, March 15. He headed instead to the ocean and checked into a Daytona Beach motel. He wandered the sandy strip, stopping to talk with young women he met there. None of them would recall that he said anything obscene or suggestive. They remembered only that he had distinctive blue eyes and a soft voice.
    A fifteen-year-old girl named Colleen Orsborn disappeared in Daytona Beach on that Thursday, gone as quickly and certainly as Beth and Rosario were. No one can say if Chris Wilder was responsible for her vanishing; she would never be found.
    Wilder had less than a month before he was scheduled to go on trial in Australia. Florida police were focusing on him, and, on Friday, the
Miami Herald
broke the story about a race car driver who was a suspect in the disappearance of both Beth Kenyon and Rosario Gonzalez. They did everything but print his name and a photograph.
    It spooked him. He had slipped out of control a few days before, and now he saw surveillance teams everywhere he looked—even though they were only in his imagination. He told acquaintances that the police were parking vehicles close to his house and business so that they could watch his every move.
    The Miami detectives had taken a calculated risk that a man with as much property and as many ties to Boynton Beach and Boca Raton would not bolt and run. In every contact with him, Christopher Wilder had been as cool as ice cream; he never got angry and he never got flustered.
    But now, driven by his obsession and his paranoia, he blinked. Quietly, Wilder withdrew savings from his bank account, using some of the money to purchase a 1973 Chrysler New Yorker with low mileage. He took his three big dogs to a kennel and left them.
    And then he left South Florida far behind. He may have had nothing left to lose, but Chris Wilder intended to make a large and horrible statement.

    Each serial killer and his evil brother, the spree killer, has a plan in mind, and a preferred victim type. While their obsessions are insane, they themselves are not. These murderers know exactly what they are looking for in a victim, and they are always prepared with a ruse, a device, a
plan
that they can activate when they spot a potential victim. Chris Wilder was fixated on beautiful young model types, the tall slender girls who were caught somewhere between the innocence of a teenager and the sophistication of a woman in her